Digital texts and teaching medical history
Transcript of Digital texts and teaching medical history
Digital texts and teaching medical historyKier Waddington, UK medical heritage library event
27/10/2016
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DIGITAL TEXTS & TEACHING MEDICAL HISTORYKEIR WADDINGTON, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
ACCESS
“Engaging with digital databases provides easy access to material for research, interaction, and deliberation, a source that is constantly available and only a click away”Linda Friday
The “digital archive goes wherever we go; it is always with us, always open,” removing the traditional constraints of time and location for research and accessing sources for teaching or student dissertationsBob Nicholson,
DIGITAL… WITH BENEFITSAccess
never hearing “it’s not in the library”
New possibilities / new frontiers
Expanding content / curricula
TRANSFORMS THE CLASSROOM INTO A LIBRARY / ARCHIVE
DIGITAL… WITH BENEFITSStudents at all levels can
explore beyond extracts / snippets develop new methods
of interpretation pursue or develop questions
Ownership of the pace / direction of their learning producers of knowledge?
BUT…
ISSUESGetting students to exploreVast array of digitized materialsFlawed or misleading results
‘keyword blinkers’ cherry-picking content via keyword searchers
Speed over thought Irrelevance and frustrationTrap of convenienceCut and paste What happens when the server goes down?
WHAT NOT TO FORGET
“I think, digital media have the potential to reshape the gathering, sharing, processing and analyzing of information, but they cannot ‘free’ historians from the demanding and complex tasks of interpretation and explanation”Beat Kumin, Warwick
EXERCISES
Start small… Integrate (where possible)…
Embed skills…Tasks to familiarise…Don’t make assumptions…
Analyse as material objects…
NOT, AND / OR THE BASICS… Preparation for future research
Understanding how digital texts / sources are created What do you gain? Miss?
Sense that not the whole The research process
Creative thinking Intuitive decision making Asking questions / changing questions Advise on searching Careful and critical reading Context, context, context
Its not all random - benefits of serendipity
OPTIONS… Searching
creating bibliographies how digital texts relate to other texts
Texts v paragraphs / gobbets Does size matter?
Change across editions across around a range of texts
Creating timelines – SMILE Timeline Widget, Neatline
Wikis & reviews Curated image collections Corpus linguistics?
QUESTIONS?THANK YOU